tapiriik

If you sync to garmin connect its easy enough to manually download many different formats of activity recording for fitness activities. I don't have a vivosmart but I haven't had issues collecting data from my Fenix watch. There is a service I do like from https://tapiriik.com/ that will sync all your fitness data across a bunch of common fitness apps (it helps when all your friends want to link up for activities but nobody agrees on a single tracking platform). One of the sync options is just to directly download all the raw datafiles to dropbox which is pretty convenient. If none of those sound good you could roll your own from the source code to tapiriik which is available here: https://github.com/cpfair/tapiriik . It does use some hacks to get around garmin not making all their APIs easy for personal development.

It find it helpful to have a goal, but it doesn't have to be a race. Other goals: run every day ("streaking"); run a certain number of miles per week, month or year. There's a FB group called "2016 in 2016" but that's too much mileage for a starting runner. I like to track my miles, and there's lots of good sites for it. I personally use Garmin Connect, then use https://tapiriik.com to sync to Strava. I also use Smashrun, which imports directly from Garmin Connect (or you can let Tapiriik sync to it). Strava lets you set a weekly mileage goal, and Smashrun lets you set a monthly and a yearly goal. I like having those staring me in the face. Tapiriik is open source btw, but believe me, just pay the guy $2/year and let him run it for you. https://github.com/cpfair/tapiriik